


in my skin indigo blue

by lucyrne (theungenue)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Comedy, Gen, Implied Rhysha, Missing Scene, Mostly Gen, Shirtless Men, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-04 20:37:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11562891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theungenue/pseuds/lucyrne
Summary: Rhys shows off his tattoos to the group to prove that he’s cool. Takes place during the Episode 3 road trip montage. Vaughn isn’t paralyzed because I said so.Implied Rhysha, but mainly a fluffy, comedic gen fic.





	in my skin indigo blue

**Author's Note:**

> Every since I saw concept art of Rhys' full tattoo, I just had to write a oneshot of him showing it off to the group. The concept art is included in the end of the fic. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! I look forward to hearing what y'all think in the comments.

“Your neck,” Sasha whispered. “What is that? It’s not a tattoo, is it?”

“He’s not cool enough for a tattoo,” Fiona said without looking up from the Bunkers and Badasses player handbook in her lap. “He’d pass out from the pain. I bet it’s dirt.”

Rhys, who up until that point was stubbornly trying to sleep on the floor, snapped his eyes open.

After traveling together in the caravan for a week, the group proved heinously bad at driving and sleeping in shifts. They constantly kept each other awake, either by playing games or arguing about something unimportant. Even after stopping for the night to force themselves to actually get some shuteye, Rhys still couldn’t find any peace.

Athena was out hunting for something edible. Rhys had gotten the impression that she was feeling claustrophobic, stuck in the caravan with four people she hardly knew and didn’t entirely like, and had taken the first opportunity to get away from them. He sort of wished he knew how to hunt or forage, because then maybe he’d have a reason to do the same.

Vaughn was slumped against the wall, holding what was left of his glasses in his slack hands. Loader Bot and Gortys kept to themselves on the roof, doing whatever it was robots did when they were bored. While Fiona dug her nose in the BnB handbook, Sasha sat cross-legged beside a prone Rhys, trying to get a better look at the tattoo peeking out of his collar.

Not wanting to wake Vaughn, Rhys whispered, “It’s not dirt. I do have a tattoo. And I didn’t pass out when I got it.”

“Pssh.”

“I’m serious. Okay, hold on.” Rhys got up with a groan. With all the running for his life he was doing lately, his leg muscles screamed with agony with every movement. He really should be resting. Not trying to look cool in front of Sasha and Fiona. But Rhys put a lot of stock in appearances, and a week on Pandora wasn’t long enough to change that.

Rhys untucked his red tie from the front of his trousers.

Fiona bolted upright, eyes wide with alarm. The BnB handbook fell from her lap to the floor with a soft thud. “If I see anything I don’t wanna see--”

“I’m just loosening my tie!” Rhys said. Fiona slowly sat back down. “Jeez. What the hell is wrong with this planet. You get a lot of flashers down here or something?” Sasha and Fiona shared a withering look, one which meant that they did get a lot of flashers on this miserable rock.

He loosened his tie and undid the top two buttons of his shirt. Lifting his chin to elongate his neck as much as possible, Rhys delicately pulled his shirt apart to reveal a swirling black tattoo. When Sasha inspected the tattoo close enough that he could feel her breath on his neck, Rhys’ ego swelled. This was why he got a tattoo in the first place. He closed his eyes and basked in the attention for a long time.

Maybe too long, for when he opened them again, Sasha was sitting beside her sister. “Legit,” Sasha said. “What’s the tattoo supposed to be?”

Rhys buttoned up his shirt, covering the tattoo once more. “It’s a hacker thing. You wouldn’t understand.” He pretended not to see both sisters roll their eyes.

It was true, the symbol was a hacker thing. It was meant to represent interconnectivity, or being jacked into the system with a whole universe of freely accessible knowledge at your fingertips. He was really into the aesthetic of hacktivism in college. The tattoo lost some of its power when Rhys got a real, state-of-the-art Hyperion port installed in his left temple, which he then used to further corporate interests. Weird how things turned out like that.

“You have any more?” Sasha asked.

Rhys smiled like a cat that just swallowed a whole family of canaries whole. “I’ve got a bigger one. But I don’t show it off to just anyone.”

“Is it a tramp stamp?” Fiona asked. “Is it the Hyperion logo on one half of your ass and bunch of stripes on the other?”

“No. No! It’s a sleeve, on my arm. I just don’t want to show it because you nearly pulled a gun on me for undoing my tie.”

“That’s fair,” Fiona said. She rested her cheek in her hand, and glanced towards Vaughn crumpled against the wall. “You have any tattoos, Vaughn?” When he didn’t answer, she threw the BnB handbook at him, waking him up mid-snore.

“Huh? Oh, nah,” Vaughn said with a dazed roll of his shoulders. “I’ve thought about it, but ever since I started lifting, it’s been on the backburner. It makes no sense getting a tattoo if it’s just gonna get stretched out, you know?”

Fiona raised an eyebrow. “Vaughn, how much muscle definition do you even have?” Still looking a little sleepy, Vaughn flexed his arm, straining the sleeve of his dirty, white dress shirt. “Holy shit. You aren’t kidding. You’ve got an actual bicep under there.”

“Thanks Fiona,” Vaughn said. His cheeks pinked a little.

Sasha leaned forward. “Do you have a six pack? That’d be cool.”

“Uh, yeah, actually.”

Rhys didn’t like where this was going.

Vaughn, both sleep deprived and overcome by all the attention, removed his shirt, revealing his stupid buff body for everyone to see. Rhys made a guttural, disgusted noise in the back of his throat to let everyone know how little he cared about this, only to find that girls weren’t paying any attention to him at all.

Sasha scooted across the floor until she was almost close enough to touch him. Fiona squatted beside her, her face a mixture of fascination and skepticism.

“It looks so real. Did Hyperion give you some super soldier serum?” Sasha asked.

“I’m in accounting,” Vaughn said, as if that explained everything.

“Who knew.” Fiona’s voice was thick with awe. “Who the hell knew.”

On the other side of the caravan, Rhys was back on his feet. “Hey guys, remember that big tattoo I have?” he said, furiously shedding his vest and unbuttoning his shirt. He ripped his tie away from his neck and let it fall to the floor. “We talked about it, like, five minutes ago? Remember? Guys?”

The sheer size of Rhys’ tattoo meant he had to be completely shirtless for anyone to see it. Usually this was an honor reserved for his girlfriends (or himself in the mirror before important meetings), but he’d make an exception for Sasha and Fiona, just this one time.

Getting the tattoo at all was an act of bravado, a stunt to prove he had the stones to secure a position at Hyperion and climb its ruthless corporate ladder. Ambitions weren’t achieved in sprints, but slow and painful marathons. If he couldn’t sit still for hours, needle pricking his skin a thousand times, and walk away with no regrets, he could never thrive at Hyperion. Besides, it looked super cool. He had heard in grad school that went a long way in the business world.

His shirt discarded to the floor, Rhys simply waited, arms away from his body and palms facing the ceiling. A pool of dark blue ink bloomed on his left shoulder, extending across his left pec and down the entirety of his arm. The ink circled his nipple and jutted towards his collarbone in a feather-like pattern. It had taken multiple sessions, hours at a time, to fill in the color evenly. And judging by the way Sasha’s eyes lit up when she saw it, it was one hundred percent worth it.

They immediately abandoned Vaughn to get a closer look at the sleeve, the new shiny thing for them to scrutinize.

“That’s a lot of ink,” Sasha said. She reached out to touch him, but remembered herself at the last minute and awkwardly stepped back. Rhys’ smug smile returned. “I can’t believe you’ve kept it hidden this whole time. Why don’t you just remove the last sleeve of your shirt? You already did it for your metal arm. What’s the point?”

Despite himself, Rhys considered it. It did feel like a shame to keep his bigger tattoo hidden away all the time. Maybe if Pandora wasn’t so sunny. He’d done a good job preserving the tattoo’s deep indigo color so far, and he didn’t want to let it fade now.

“Does everyone at Hyperion hide secrets underneath their clothes?” Fiona asked. Her eyes drifted down Rhys’ chest. Instead of complimenting him or commenting on Rhys’ physique, she poked him in the nipple.

“Boop.”

Before Rhys could react, the door to the caravan swung open.

Athena froze in the threshold.

Her eyes scanned the room slowly, taking in the discarded clothes all over the floor, a strangely-ripped Vaughn cowering against the wall, Fiona stock-still beside a shirtless Rhys, her finger still pressed on his nipple, Sasha backing away from them both. No one moved, save for the subtle flaring of Athena’s nostrils.

Without speaking, Athena turned around and went back outside.


End file.
